This is probably a good time to review the evidence. A summary: The earliest known records of "our" Thomas are the baptisms of his children at the parish church of Goodworth Clatford, starting in 1623 (second child, Thomas). There were Blanchards in the same parish in the 1560's, but no other Blanchard records there until 1623. However, there are some gaps in the parish records, and one such gap covers the time when Thomas' first known child, George, was born and also probably when Thomas was married. As soon as Thomas emigrated, another Blanchard appeared and started having children baptized there (John Blanchard). There were lots of Thomas Blanchards in Hampshire, as seen in the IGI, but no baptism on record seems to fit the emigrant. Same for nearby Wiltshire. When Thomas married his second wife, Agnes (Bent) Barnes, he was called a "yeoman" in the marriage licence. That term would not be applied to a resident alien. There are records of "denization" (naturalization) from that era, but no one has found a record that matches our Thomas. There are also records for Huguenot churches in England, but no mention of our Thomas Blanchard has been found in them. This has all been discussed at various times on the list, and the details are thus available in the archives. Those who wish to see more can find the archives via the web: http://searches.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/listsearch.pl There is a blank on that page for entering the name of the list -- put blanchard-l there and go for it. 1996 and 1997 are kept in separate databases. The search page gives some examples of the syntax for queries, but there are some other useful features. In addition to the notation 'word1 and word2', which finds messages that contain both words somewhere, there is another: 'word1+word2' which looks for the two words next to each other. (The single quotes should not be entered.) There is yet another syntax: '"word1 word2"' (The double quotes are real.) This is similar to the '+' notation. In fact, it may be equivalent -- I'm not sure. Some quirks: you can't have a leading blank inside the quotes, and if the first character is a digit, the search pattern will match even if that digit appears at the end of a numeric string in the message. However, a search string that begins with a letter must match starting at the beginning of a word. Note: 1998 messages are apparently not yet available for searching. John